How should entrepreneurs make decisions? Ray Zinn, the epitome of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship discusses the rigors of starts decisions.

Guy Smith: Hello again, and welcome to another episode of the Tough Things First podcast, where we engage Ray Zinn, the longest serving CEO in Silicon Valley. And we talk about entrepreneurship, leadership, executive management, and a little bit about society and how we all get along in life.

But today we’re going to have, I think one of the more interesting topics for my mind, and that’s the art of decision making for entrepreneurs. Because in my time in Silicon Valley, and nurturing a lot of startups myself, I have seen entrepreneurs absolutely lock their brains in trying to make some fundamental decisions and Ray, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of problems with making quality decisions quickly. So, we’re going to figure out how he does it.

So Good Morning Ray. Welcome again. Thank you so much for taking time with us.

Ray Zinn: Well, thank you guys. Good to be back with you today.

Guy Smith: An entrepreneur or somebody launching their own business, they have to make thousands of decisions. I mean, that’s pretty much their job is to make a lot of decisions, make them quickly, make them with a certain amount of quality. And yet a lot of guys and a lot of women, they kind of freeze up, especially on some of the big decisions. What is it that causes people to freeze, and not make the decisions that they need to make?

Ray Zinn: Well, Tom Peters in his book, In the Pursuit of Excellence, talks about ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, and never fire. What we need to do, as Tom says in his book, is ready, fire, aim. That seems kind of counterintuitive, but back in the days when we had the battleships and destroyers, they would fire for effect. In other words, you would shoot a round off and see where it went, high or low. (more…)

There is no time like the holidays when employees and management alike tend to think about anything but work. In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn is quizzed on dealing with employee seasonal distractions. The give and take of making it through the holiday hump.

Rob Artigo: Rob Artigo here, your guest host for another edition of the Tough Things First podcast with Ray Zinn. I’m a writer and entrepreneur in California. Well, being invited back is always a pleasure, Ray. How you doing?

Ray Zinn: I’m doing fine. I hope you’re enjoying your day today. And it’s always good to have you, Rob.

Rob Artigo: I found a column on US News and World Report online. It was actually a column that was originally published by Associated Press and picked up by the paper. So this is the way it goes. “The holiday season can be a motivation and productivity killer at some small businesses,” it says. “Staffers may spend time chatting or shopping online, ask to leave early for children’s holiday events, or just not be in the mood to work.”

It also says, “The companies with the most holiday problems are likely to be the ones where November and December aren’t a particularly busy period,” and so we’re not talking about that retailers, and the restaurants, and the caterers, and other companies like that where staffers understand when they’re hired that this is a prime time for the type of work they’re going to be doing.

At any company though, if employees are distracted, the owners of course find it, it’s difficult to be flexible with the employees when you got to accommodate everything. I suppose, Ray, in your many years of experience, 37 years at Micrel, that you had to deal with, well if it was 37 years, it was likely to have been something like 37 Christmas/holiday cycles. So you’ve dealt with this a lot. Is this something, in your experience, that has been a problem historically?

Ray Zinn: Well, it’s only been a problem, I think, in the last 20 some years. That wasn’t really a problem before that, but in the last 20 something years, it has become more of a problem, especially as people expect more and they expect, by the way, to have time off during the holidays. It used to be the employee worked around the problem and now they’re expecting the employer to work around the problem. (more…)

Any challenge you face that can take years, with hours upon hours of thought and work, can seem like an insurmountable challenge. In his latest podcast, Ray Zinn talks about writing books, and how met the challenges by doing the Tough Things First.

Rob Artigo: I’m Rob Artigo, back again, your guest host for another edition of Tough Things First, with Ray Zinn. I’m a writer and entrepreneur. Being invited back is always a pleasure, Ray.

Ray Zinn: It’s always, good to have you, Rob. You’re always so energetic and enthusiastic.

Rob Artigo: Congratulations on the new book, The Zen of Zinn.

Ray Zinn: Thank you.

Rob Artigo: In short, I don’t want to say Reader’s Digest version, but here briefly, a little bit about what the readers will get where they pick up a copy of The Zen of Zinn.

Ray Zinn: The Zen of Zinn is a collection of thoughts that I have written over the years, going back to when I started my coral. I just would have these thoughts, these motivational thoughts that I would give my staff and the operations people, just food for thought as they say, you know, Chicken Soup For The Soul. That’s what the compilation is, these little snippets, very short little blurbs on many, many, many subjects. That’s what The Zen Of Zinn’s about. (more…)

How we solve problems defines our success. Ray Zinn discusses problem solving as a life and business skill.

Guy Smith: Hello everyone and welcome again to another edition of the Tough Things First podcast. My name is Guy Smith. I’m your guest host for today and this is going to be one of my favorite podcasts because not only do we have Ray Zinn who this podcast centers around but his delightful wife Delona is here with us as well and we are going to be talking about problem solving and as you know here in Silicon Valley we like trying to solve problems and Ray has cracked a few nuts in his career and his lifetime and Delona has also shared in the problem solving melee. So we’re going to jump right into it. First, good morning to everybody.

Delona Zinn: Good morning Guy.

Ray Zinn: Hi Guy. Glad to have you here with us.

Guy Smith: Hey. Glad to be here. Glad to be here in Silicon Valley. That’s one of the things that I like about this turf is that everyone seems to be interested in looking at problems and trying to find some solution to the big ones and the small ones alike. Ray, you have some interesting thoughts about the nature of problems themselves and what really is and isn’t a problem?

Ray Zinn: That’s the purpose of it is just to … You first of all have to say what is the problem? The problem is the problem, meaning that the problem that you’re trying to solve has to be one that’s gonna be actually realized as the one you’re gonna work on, not something you think is the problem when it really isn’t. I like that saying the problem is the problem, trying to come up with the right problem to solve and not trying to solve a problem that really isn’t a problem. Because we all like to solve problems and we think [inaudible 00:02:21], if we don’t have a problem to solve we’re not contributing to society as you would. We don’t want to create problems either. We want to be a problem solver, not a problem creator.

Delona Zinn: That brings me to mind an incident that we had one time. We have a place in Montana and we were in California at the time and we got a call from our daughter and she says, “Dad, we’ve got a great big limb that fell off the tree across the row from us. What am I gonna do about it? Who do I call?” My husband said, “Well, just treat it like it would be if it was your own property and go in and find somebody in the phone book or whatever. Just take care of it yourself. I can’t do anything from here. You have control of it there.”

I think she got the idea on that one because we haven’t heard back from her on other problems but it’s interesting how people kind of think that if they bring a problem to you that they could actually take care of themself that somehow it’s going to be not their problem.

Ray Zinn: They’re a problem creator, not a problem solver. In that case, you create a problem for us by saying, “Oh, what do we do? There’s a limb down in the yard.” That becomes a problem for me.

Delona Zinn: Exactly.

Ray Zinn: We were on the way to the airport and our driver … Our chauffeur was telling us that he ran into a situation where he picked up a client … In fact it was a client out of Facebook, and as soon as he started driving, she says, “Oh, I got this phone call.” So she took the call and it was one of her employees saying, “There’s a snake in the office. What do we do?” The client says, “I don’t know. I’m on my way to the airport.”

Delona Zinn: What do you want me to do?

Ray Zinn: [inaudible 00:04:15], right, so, anyway.

Guy Smith: It’s like the transference of the problem. In the case of your daughter, the limb was laying across the road, it was obviously going to be an obstruction for her but she didn’t handle the problem that was immediately her difficulty, she transferred it to somebody else. You ran your own company for 37 years, Ray. Did you see a lot of that [inaudible 00:04:43] work environment?

Ray Zinn: Sure. We often talked about being a problem solver, not a problem creator. I don’t want to be the problem. I want to be a problem solver. I even make the comment sometimes that pray for problems because that’s how we grow. Adversity is like manure. It stinks but it helps us grow. I don’t mind a problem. I enjoy them because it helps me grow but I want to solve it. I don’t want to just create it. So that’s the big difference and so my people would understand and know that what I expect them is to bring me solutions. I love solutions. So don’t bring me your problem, bring me a solution. They have this idea, this concept to fix this particular issue, that’s what I want to hear, not, “Oh, boss, we have this big problem we gotta handle.”

Guy Smith: Some people seem to be like automatic problem generation machines. They are the ones who view the world as a series of problems and keep spitting them out to their co-workers, their bosses. How does a good manager address somebody like that? How do you help them become a problem solver instead of a problem generator?

Ray Zinn: Well, like I talk about in my book Tough Things First, if you learn to take care of the difficult tasks, then those difficult tasks don’t become onerous to you. You get used to it because the first thing you want to do is deal with those … Eating that ugly frog as they say first and get rid of that problem first thing rather than wait and solve it later or pass it on to someone else. When we talk about delegation, we’re not talking about just delegating responsibility to manager to run a group. We’re talking about delegating them to solve problems. That’s what delegation is. It’s not just I’m gonna delegate authority to run a department because part of running a department is solving problems. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what happens every single day when I go into work is I have to solve some problems. I know that when I wake up in the morning and so I’m getting that mindset in my head that I’m a problem solver and so bring me your tired, your weary and whatever, I’ll solve it. That’s kinda what … If you teach the employees that, if you can get them to understand the concept, doing the tough things first, then they’ll love it. They’ll enjoy solving problems because that’s learning to love the things you hate as I mentioned also in the book.

Guy Smith: Speaking of the book, for those in the audience who have not read Tough Things First, you’ve been cheating yourself out of both an enjoyable read but also a manual for life almost. In this book Ray has basically distilled all of the wisdom that he achieved in not only his working career but 37 years of founding and running Micrel Corporation, the most consistently profitable semiconductor company in Silicon Valley as best as my recordkeeping can tell. So by all means drop by Amazon today, get yourself a copy of that book. Now Delona, you mentioned the ranch, and of course that captivates my attention given my history of having been on a little family ranch in my youth. A lot of situations come up on a ranch and I’ve got to imagine that you’ve seen people on the ranch handle and not handle problems effectively. What is the biggest problem generation or maybe the better question is what is the best thing you’ve seen people do on the ranch in terms of getting to the root of the problem and addressing it right away.

Delona Zinn: Well, we do have a little problem with that because we do have a lot of problems brought to us but luckily enough we do have a good caretaker that when we tell him that there is a problem or a lot of times he’ll jump on a problem himself. He’ll see a problem and he’ll go ahead and just take care of it. You really have to have a mentality of thinking how am I gonna take care of this situation and assume that responsibility yourself. Sometimes that works out good and sometimes it doesn’t work out good but for the most part it will work out good. If you just think in your head, “Okay, how can I do this without bothering somebody else?” We’ve been very fortunate with a good caretaker that is able to follow through on a lot of that stuff and take care of it for us.

Guy Smith: You’ve been married 57 years, at least this August you’ll be married 57 years. You have 22 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren and so I’m sure in that period of time you’ve dealt with a lot of issues. So to our listeners now who are listening to this podcast, they’d like to know how did you do that? How were you able to not just the problem off to someone else or to just ignore it. How did you manage to survive being married to only one person for 57 years and to handle your four children, your twenty-two grand children, your seven great-grandchildren. What’s your advice to them as to how they can more effectively deal with problems or be a problem solver?

Delona Zinn: I think you have to have a positive attitude.

Ray Zinn: [inaudible 00:10:24]

Delona Zinn: The way you do things. I’ve always tried to be a cheerful, positive person because I know that that solves a lot of problems within a marriage. If you can have one spouse that tries to be happy and positive all the time, then it kind of levels out any other feelings that … Because I know you would come home really stressed and tired and I wanted to make sure that I provided an environment that would counteract that particular problem that you were having because of the things that happened during the day. Most of the time you did come home very upbeat but there were times that you really needed to have that positive, happy atmosphere within the home. A lot of the things that I would do to make it more pleasant for you to come home was that I would make sure that … I knew that you were an orderly person and I am too to some degree but not quite as much as you, not to the point that you are.

I would make sure that there was an organized environment when you got home. It was close to dinnertime so we would have the kids get all of the stuff picked up that they’d been playing with, get it put back where it was supposed to be, and I always made sure that I provided a nice dinner for you to come home to because I knew that you needed to have that stress release. So when you came home, the kids had their stuff picked up and I always like to look nice myself anyway but I always felt that it was a key component to our marriage for me to look nice for you so I didn’t create a want for you to go outside the home and seek something better. I wasn’t gonna let anybody else take that advantage of you. I always made sure I looked the best I could when you came home. My hair was fixed, I had lipstick on, and I was dressed fairly decent. Again, I was doing work around the home but I still made myself look presentable and desirable to you. So those were some of the things that I found that I needed to create as I was raising the children and I’ve always tried to create a happy, positive environment.

Ray Zinn: Well again, I think what you’re talking about is that you didn’t want to become part of the problem.

Delona Zinn: Absolutely.

Ray Zinn: So you wanted to make sure that you minimized that and that’s the key for employees too is that they don’t want to be part of the problem. They want to be a problem solver and being kind and understanding and friendly will definitely help reduce the normal tension that exists in an office anyway. So I think that your point about the way you dealt with your marriage is that you wanted to make sure that you had a kind, loving home and that could be translated into the workplace. Have a kind, loving workplace and you will have fewer problems because what happens is unfriendly or unkind workplaces just create tension and that in itself creates problems and then the real problems don’t get solved because we’re working on those humanistic problems that are not fun to do nor are they something that need to be done if we have the right kind of environment that we’re in.

Guy Smith: Delona, you said something which triggered a thought because you were talking about positive outlook, positive nature. Negativity in and of itself is almost a problem because it presents to other people a wall, a barrier, a pushback or something like that. Is this one of the reasons Washington, D.C. is so lousy at solving problems? Because they seem to be a negativity generating city. There’s perpetual conflict, perpetual opposition. There is more negativity with inside of the Beltway than I see in the rest of the country. Is this possibly part of the overall political problem?

Delona Zinn: I think so and it’s a lot of selfishness too. It’s what I want and not being willing to work with the other person and see that person’s point of view. I think that a lot of that could be eliminated if people would just sit back and as my husband always says, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. If you would just use them proportionately, then you could solve a lot of problems.

Ray Zinn: I think if there was a kinder, loving, gentler mentality in Washington, I think we’d get a whole lot more done and hopefully our listeners can understand that and support us in trying to have a kinder, gentler relationship with each other and also encourage our government officials to do the same.

Guy Smith: That’s an interesting observation, if we as citizens are kinder and gentler with one another, our disposition that we want our representatives kind of then has to follow suit. So the solution begin with us and then us presenting it to our elected officials. Well, Ray, Delona, thank you so very much. This has been enlightening, invigorating, and definitely positive and I appreciate you for taking the time and you guys have a wonderful day and for all of our listeners, make sure that you subscribe to the Tough Things First podcast. You can do that on iTunes, Stitcher, Podcast Attic, all the normal places where you like to obtain your podcast content and by all means, rate and review this podcast and tell all of your friends because they will benefit from it too.

How does one deal with obstreperous people and employees? Ray Zinn and his wife DeLona chat about how people who like breaking rules benefit companies and society, and how to keep them from running amok.

Guy Smith: Well, good morning everyone in podcast land. My name is Guy Smith, I’m your guest host for today’s episode of the ‘Tough Things First’ podcast. This is a special, special edition. Not only do we have our perpetual guest, Ray Zinn, with us, but we have his delightful wife Delona, as well. We’re going to be talking about obstreperous people, especially obstreperous employees. If you hear a little giggle in my voice, it’s because I spent most of my youth as an obstreperous person. My first promotion in life came from completely breaking the rules entirely, with inside of a work environment, and so I’ve seen it from both sides, having been the obstreperous employee, and also being a manager, and having obstreperous employees working for me.

I really want to pick Ray’s brain, and Delona’s brain, because they’ve probably seen many, many more obstreperous folks than I have and they probably have better ways of handling them than I do.

First thing, good morning to both of you, Ray and Delona.

Delona Zinn: Good morning, Guy!

Ray Zinn: Well thanks, Guy, for inviting us back.

Guy Smith: Hey, thank you for letting me be the guest host again. Let’s jump right into it. Before we talk about managing obstreperous people, what is it about their personality types that actually make them obstreperous?

Ray Zinn: Let’s talk about what the definition of obstreperous is.

Guy Smith: Well, obstreperous people are people who tend to buck the rules. They tend to want to do things their way. They tend to not see the sense behind the various rules, and thus are overtly willing to go around them.

Ray Zinn: But there’s another characteristic that they have, they tend to be loud, whining, okay, and difficult to manage because they want, they’re always out there in front. So it’s kind of like the guy that want to star on the basketball court. You know, you’ve seen those guys they’re on the football field or whatever. They’re the one that are doing the high fives and slamming the football down or doing the smack talk and stuff like that. And those individuals tend not to want to follow the rules. They will sneak around, they will try to take advantage every angle that they can. We call them bending the rules I guess is referred to it sometime. So when you’re obstreperous, you’re one that you want to be recognized, you’re the one that wants be out there, the star you would. Or you’re the whiner, you’re the one that complains a lot. So obstreperous means you’re loud, whiny, you’re out there trying to promote yourself. It’s not a matter of them it’s a matter of me. What do I want and how do I want to look at things. So and they just can’t play by the rules.

We have this recent thing with the issues with the ex-director of the FBI who’s published a book, or has recently published a book and he’s going after the president of the United States, the sitting president. He’s obstreperous, in other words he has his view of how he wants to see things and he wants to be out there in front. He wants to be, he’s trying to create an aura, so that’s the difficult one to manage and control.

Guy Smith: So, there is almost kind of two flavors of it. The common theme is that they want to do things their way, they would prefer to do that as opposed to any particular set of rules. Some of them are also then glory seekers on top of that, they like the attention. I know about being the former type and got way too many stories about that.

Delona, and you have had to have run into a couple of obstreperous people, especially up at the ranch. People who, you know despite the fact that there’s some mission with inside the family, inside the ranch, whatnot, they’re going to go off on their own vector. Are you seeing the same traits that Ray sees in them?

Delona Zinn: For the most part, yeah. We’ve even had it even within our own children as they were growing up. There was some that no matter what the rule was they always were willing to bend or break the rule and a lot of them, there was one that wanted to take it right to the very edge as far as he could go. But there was a certain point where he would not go beyond but he always stretched everything right to the very end as far as he could go and as a parent it was very frustrating to see that because we had others that were more willing to live by the rules and everything. But-

Ray Zinn: But he was the more creative one-

Delona Zinn: He was, he was more, [crosstalk 00:05:41] he had very smart-

Ray Zinn: -music and-

Delona Zinn: Very very smart, intelligent-wise and a quick learner, very quick learner-

Ray Zinn: Very articulate.

Delona Zinn: -was very bored with school because he was, they didn’t challenge him enough. There wasn’t enough challenge there.

Guy Smith: Are you sure you didn’t adopt my missing brother here? Because he sounds a lot like me.

Ray Zinn: Well the whole purpose of this podcast though is how do you deal with that obstreperous personality. Because on the one hand they’re very creative but on the other hand they like to bend the rules, they like to operate outside the box as you would and so they don’t like to be confined. In other words, don’t tell me what I can’t do, tell me what I can do. They just go beyond, which is good, I mean, we want to test the waters as you would, want to make sure that we have examined all aspects of it but not to the point where it’s deleterious, where it damages the company or damages the organization. As long as you, as you’re dealing with obstreperous people, employees or family or whatever, as long as you treat them with respect and show understanding and willingness to work with them you can keep them within the rules and the bounds of the family or the organization as long as you don’t become their enemy.

You recognize them for who they are, they tend to be quite creative, quite innovative, but again they’re gonna want to push the envelope, they’re gonna want to go outside the current rules that you have. And so what I tried to do when I was running Micrel for 37 years was make sure that the rules were flexible, that they were kind of more general as opposed to being so tight that you couldn’t maneuver within that. I found that people tend to bring the rules where they used to work back to their current company ’cause that’s what they’re used to. You have to make it flexible enough that allows their understanding and what makes sense to operate within the bounds that you want within your company.

I’d say that probably daily I was dealing with issues where people would come in and say, “well he, or he or she, is doing this or that you know and that’s not according to company policy” and so forth and I was always doing, well I said, “Well, what policy is it you’re referring to?” Well, they couldn’t re-tell me. They would just make up their own policy saying, “well I thought this was the policy” or “I thought that was the rule” and I say, “Well, show me.” Then they find out that they made up their own rule or policy that this person was violating or not following in their mind.

Guy Smith: And this gets to economic theory in kind of a way because these people are motivated by something that typical employees maybe even typical human beings aren’t, and as you say they are creative so you don’t want to de-motivate them. So what is their motivation for breaking the rules and how do you then allow them to stretch the boundaries to avoid becoming de-motivated, knowing that if you put the clamps on them too hard they will become de-motivated and leave and take their creativity with them?

Ray Zinn: That’s always the challenge because you want some structure, you don’t want to have an anarchist organization. So you have to have structure and as long as you give them the courtesy to allow them to be creative and innovative but yet let them operate within the bounds of the company, they’re motivated and they’ll stay productive. It’s when you start telling them no you can’t do that, or no you can’t do that, no you can’t do that, is when they’re either gonna leave or they’re gonna shut down. What you say, when someone does something that is not in accordance with company policy you just say, “Yes I agree with you but here’s what we need to do.” So it starts out with a yes not, “No you can’t do this.” Say, “Yes you can do that, but we need to do this in concert.” I was constantly dealing with people who were wanting to do something that from a policy point of view was not in accordance with what we has as a direction of the company.

And as they say, “Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get bent out of shape.” So what I try to do was be flexible so they didn’t bend everybody out of shape. What I try to do is make sure that the policies we had within the company were flexible.

Guy Smith: You know and occasionally putting the obstreperous person in charge of what they’re breaking works. My first promotion in life was when I worked for McDonnell Douglas in the Kennedy Space Center. I hacked a NASA computer, I reconfigured it to run faster and being of a boy scout mentality I went down the hall and told the NASA administrator what I had done to his computer. And two weeks later McDonnell Douglas sent me to the other side on the river to Canaveral Air Force station and put me in charge of a Tempest Computer [inaudible 00:11:26]. This is a computing facility where all the rooms are lead-lined, you cannot get RF signals in and out and they said, “Look, if this guy really wants to bend around security let’s put him in charge of security, ’cause he’s obviously a little bit interested in it.” And so tapping that creativity and re-channeling it I think is kind of what you just said, you can have the boundaries but if you can focus it then you get someplace else.

Delona Zinn: That’s true.

Guy Smith: Well, children and employees alike, one thing that I’m interested in is bringing up people’s creativity, letting people blossom. Is there value in taking people, encouraging them to be a little bit obstreperous when it’s maybe not their nature? Is that a good tool for expanding their horizons? Developing their personalities? Making them better children, better employees?

Delona Zinn: Well, you can’t make somebody into something that’s not part of them. You can encourage some creativity but each person is unique and individual and it’s like trying to force a left hand-er to write right-handed. You can try to make them do it and they might be a little bit successful at doing it but their handwriting might not be as clear and precise as it would if they had done it with their left hand. So we each have individual strengths and weaknesses and I don’t think you can try to make somebody something that they don’t have in them.

Ray Zinn: We got a son, our oldest son, he was one that tried not to push the envelope. He obeyed all the rules, he was someone who was just reluctant to try anything difficult or new. I’d work with him and try to get him to try different things, to try to break, as you would, break out of this mold of being too worried. He was more pessimistic that way. And now he’s one of the most creative children that we have, it’s because I kept encouraging to push himself, to go outside of his comfort zone. And that’s how I was able to develop his creativity is by getting him to try doing the tough things first, as you would. Trying to go beyond what’s easy and simple, and he did it. I encouraged him to get a double E and he was not, from a scholastic point of view, he was not good in physics or math or anything like that but I encouraged him to do it because I thought he could do it number one but also I felt that this would be good for him, and he did. He got his double E and now he’s extremely creative and innovative.

Guy Smith: So it does work in some regards to encourage people along that way. So I’m wondering if allowing small amounts of rule breaking helps kind of crack that nut, in other words to let people who are a little bit afraid to go out and try new things, gives them the permission then to explore that creativity.

Ray Zinn: I wasn’t encouraging them to break the rules though. I was just encouraging him to go outside of his comfort zone. Not just stick with what was easy and simple and straightforward. And that’s what I meant by getting them to actualize their capability. We’re far more capable that we think we are. I have people that work for me that will try something they have no knowledge or capability of and they screw it up good. But others that are afraid, by just getting the blossom as you said earlier they did try, “Oh yeah I can do that.” Then they become encouraged and they go ahead and succeed. But as Delona said, you can’t get a left-handed person to write right-handed. You gotta kind of work within the skill set that they have. If they don’t have that innate capability, in other words if they’re a lefty and you’re trying to make them throw right-handed you’re probably wasting your time. But for those who are left-handed and you get them to do better left-handed because they think, well lefties can’t do as well as righties, well if you can get them to overcome that fear then they will blossom.

Guy Smith: And I think that’s the message for the managers, the entrepreneurs, the executives listening in on today’s podcast is don’t fear the obstreperous employee, they add value to your organization, you got to accept the fact that they’re always going to challenge you, always gonna bend the rules a little bit. But if they weren’t that kind of personality they probably wouldn’t be bringing the creativity you need in your organization to find the next best thing, to find the new way of doing the process, to improve the entire overall product line or organization or whatever it is that drives your business.

And speaking of driving your business, if you have not read Ray’s first book ‘Tough Things First’ you need to do that right away. Drop what you’re doing, go to amazon.com, buy a copy. It’s Ray’s distillation of his 37 years of founding and leading Micrel, from infancy, through IPO, and creating the most consistently profitable semiconductor company is Silicon Valley. It is required reading not only for you, but it’s becoming require reading on college campuses around the country. Academia is picking up on this book and telling their students, “If you really want the lessons delivered to you fast and hard, this is the right book to be reading.”

So thanks again for tuning into the Tough Things First podcast and tune in next week, we’ve got even more content coming your way then.